IMHO this is probably huge for net neutrality, but I wonder where their (generally accepted) efforts at traffic shaping will end up in all of this? I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.
I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters).
However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for.
For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area.
This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.
Those 1.5Mbit DSL is "maximum capacity." Not what you should try to consume. Ultimately, all the customers go through one pipe, or a shared few pipes, so those hogging the lines negatively affect others.
In my opinion, it's the users of the bandwidth that are greedy. Do they really need 1,000 movies on their hard drives? Many bit torrenters have more content than they could ever watch in their entire lives...
If they don't want people to use the bandwith they pay to get, they should say so by advertising their monthly cap or whatever.
The idea that I can only transfer the particular types of bits across the wire that my ISP thinks I should is exactly the point of net neutrality rules. If that's not an infringement of free speech, I don't know what is.
Limiting the ability to share movies online is not an infringement of free speech.
I'm pretty sure the telcos don't have enough lines for everyone to place a call at the same time. Are you also going to argue that running a call center should be prohibited, too, because you are excessively using shared resources?
Why would your 24MBit/s work slower for bit-torrent than other uses? The whole point of this net neutrality debate is that ISPs have no business deciding which traffic they prefer, much like your phone company has no business deciding which one of your friends you're allowed to call.